The Silver Screen Oasis

Rona Anderson, the Scottish actress, who has died aged 86, regularly starred in films throughout the 1950s, and had a stage career for more than half a century.

She was also notable for marrying her fellow Scots actor, Gordon Jackson, both on- and off-screen. Their marriage endured happily and meant that, after 1960, she took fewer roles in order to raise their two sons.

She had first met Jackson when making Floodtide (1949), a shipyard drama with some location shooting in Glasgow, made for Rank, to which she was under contract. The plot saw their two characters fall in love and two years later, in 1951, the actors married for real.

Rona Anderson acted with her husband again in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1969); and in a BBC2 version of Somerset Maugham’s Rain (1970), with Carroll Baker as Sadie Thompson. A 1983 episode of the action series The Professionals, in which Jackson starred as the head of the unorthodox law enforcement agency CI5, featured Anderson as the mother of a stalking victim; her casting was kept secret from Jackson until the first day of shooting.

Often out on loan from Rank in the early part of her career, Rona Anderson was a sympathetic heroine in monochrome crime thrillers throughout the 1950s . In Scrooge (1951) she was cast as the sweetheart of the young Ebenezer (played by Alastair Sim’s protégé George Cole) who rejects him for his increased avariciousness. Another role founded on a character’s emerging conscience came in Soho Incident (1956), when she played the sister of a murdered boxer.

Among her genre outings, two credits stand out. The Twenty Questions Murder Mystery (1950) was set around the long-running radio quiz, with Richard Dimbleby and ITMA stalwart Jack Train appearing as themselves. And Little Red Monkey (1954) was a very early example of a television spin-off, being a reworking of a BBC thriller serial from the previous year, where the female lead had been played by Anderson’s fellow Rank contract artiste Honor Blackman.

Rona Anderson was born in Edinburgh on August 3 1926 . Following education in her home city and in Ottawa, where she was evacuated in the Second World War, she joined the Ardrossan Amateur Dramatic Society. Her training was at the Glover Turner-Robertson School of Drama, in Edinburgh’s George Street.

She joined the company of the Citizens’ Theatre Glasgow in 1945, first attracting attention in the title role of Cornelia (1946), playing a teenage force of nature. Another title role, opposite Citizens’ stalwart Duncan Macrae, was Bunty Pulls The Strings (1948), which she performed again five years later in her home city, for the Edinburgh Gateway Company.

Her West End debut was in a comedy, The White Sheep Of The Family (Piccadilly, 1951), starring Jack Hulbert. A rural comedy, A Month Of Sundays (Cambridge, 1957), in which she supported AE Matthews in his 500th role, was an early production of Michael Codron.

The well-constructed thriller Sleeping Car To Trieste (1948) gave her a screen debut, in a supporting role. For the BBC she played Robert Burns’s near-lover Nancie Maclehose in The Other Dear Charmer (1959), made for Burns’s bicentenary, with Tom Fleming as the poet.

She played the wife of Paul Scofield’s kidnapped diplomat in Christopher Hampton’s Savages (Royal Court, 1973); was in the original production of Whose Life Is It Anyway? (Mermaid, 1978); and was Lady Saltburn in a Liverpool Playhouse revival of Present Laughter (1993). All of these were alongside Tom Conti, who revelled in what he called Rona Anderson’s “sparkling personality” and became, with his wife, a close friend.

Popular within the profession, Rona Anderson was even numbered among the close friends of the temperamental Kenneth Williams. Williams made frequent visits to her Hampstead home, particularly on New Year’s Eve.

Gordon Jackson died in 1990, and she is survived by two sons.

Rona Anderson, born August 3 1926, died July 23 2013.